Libraries Write New Chapter

Billed as the crown jewel of a civic renaissance, this city’s New Main library opened just over nine months ago to national acclaim for its daring architecture and bold embrace of technology.

Gleaming in marble splendor within the Civic Center, the New Main was hailed as a model public library for the 21st century. From its light-filled, six-story entrance atrium to the comfortably furnished study nooks tucked into corners and the computers offering free Internet access, the new library seemed to have it all.

But from the beginning, some saw the library’s offerings as threats, not blessings. Free access to computers and videocassettes, displays of dramatic public art and myriad meeting rooms open to community groups are all fine, critics said, but where are the books?

“I feel so angry and so betrayed,” said Tille Olsen, a poet and author of short stories who spent thousands of hours educating herself in the musty book stacks of the 19th century Old Main.

Visiting the New Main shortly after it opened, Olsen looked at the atrium and saw a void where she thought books should be. She saw youngsters crowded around computer terminals in the roomy and colorful children’s center, but noticed none of them prowling through open stacks of books. She saw the names of prominent corporate donors mentioned liberally throughout the library and recoiled.

And she found that not one book she wanted to check out was available.

“The New Main is a betrayal of what a public library is supposed to be about,” Olsen said. In its rush to embrace technology, she mourned, the library “left its soul behind.”

Olsen’s assessment pinpoints the dilemma librarians and library lovers in many communities are facing as they update one of society’s most cherished public institutions. How do you move a public library into the Information Age without sacrificing its traditional role as a collector and circulator of books? How do you modernize a library without violating the sentimental notions many Americans carry with them from their youth--memories of quiet retreats presided over by stern but kind librarians?

“There are debates going on everywhere,” said Peter Lyman, UC Berkeley’s chief librarian. “Some people are wary that this technological library is being sold as a replacement to the traditional library. It is a question of what is being lost as well as what is being gained.”

In the case of the New Main--dubbed that in the planning stages years ago to distinguish it from the then-functioning Old Main--criticisms such as Olsen’s gradually gained credence.

From the day it opened last April, the New Main seemed to lurch from one problem, one scandal to the next.

There were lengthy lines to check out materials, shortages of public bathrooms, flaws in the computerized catalog, long lag times for re-shelving books and then the sudden, shocking news of a $2.8-million deficit in the library system’s budget.

A loose-knit band of authors, bibliophiles and intellectual gadflies began showing up at Library Commission meetings to denounce the New Main. Newspaper headlines, radio talk shows and magazine pieces dissected its operations.

There was criticism that books took second place, even when it came to the design of the building. Space that could have been used to shelve books, critics said, had been given over to “affinity groups” to build single-subject study centers for Filipinos, African Americans, gays and lesbians and others.

Space also had been set aside for community rooms, part of Chief Librarian Kenneth Dowlin’s vision of the New Main as a meeting spot. As a result, many books available to the public in the Old Main now were stored in closed stacks, accessible only to library employees.

Demoralized librarians said the New Main--swamped by as many as 12,000 visitors a day in the beginning to a still hefty 5,600 now--did not work.

They complained of computer terminals often being on the blink and of patrons practically coming to blows as they stood in line for those that functioned.

“All in all, it’s been quite a disappointment,” said Kathy Bremer, a branch librarian who heads the librarians union. “They created a cultural center. It looks like a mall.”

The revelation that caught the attention of official San Francisco came in December, when Dowlin told a stunned County Board of Supervisors of the $2.8-million budget deficit. The financial crisis was so severe, he said, that he was forced to temporarily stop buying new books as part of a package of cost-cutting measures.

“It’s been a wild ride” since the New Main opened, Dowlin told the board as he struggled to explain where the money had gone.

There were signs of trouble even months before the opening day. When librarians revealed that they had culled 100,000 books from the collection and tossed them out, a furor erupted.

Critics charged the culling was done to fit the collection into its new home. Library managers said the books were damaged or outdated.

To comply with a city ordinance that barred the sale of the books, the tomes were buried in a city landfill.

The outcry was so great that the library’s embarrassed management invited the public to pick through discards not yet disposed of. In response, the local chapter of the Gray Panthers organized a rescue operation.

“We are keeping them in trust for the library until they come to their senses,” said Deetje Boler, a bibliophile who said she must squeeze past boxes of books to get out her front door. Boler said she carted home several hundred books earmarked for destruction.

“I stuck mostly to nonfiction, but how do you choose?” Boler said. “These were the books that librarians had preserved for generations.”

Then came the fight over the card catalog. Bibliophiles battled, unsuccessfully, for a place in the New Main for the 2,520 carved drawers of the catalog they said were needed to supplement the new, computerized version.

The Library Commission said not only was there no room, the printed catalog was obsolete.

Leading the defense of the old catalog was author Nicholson Baker, who sued the Library Commission for access to prove that it listed books the online catalog did not include. Ultimately, the commission agreed to give the public access to the old catalog, which will be located in a nearby exhibition hall.

The story of the New Main is nothing less than “a case study of what can happen . . . when telecommunications enthusiasts take over big old research libraries and attempt to remake them, with corporate help, as high-traffic showplaces for information technology,” Baker charged in an article he wrote in the New Yorker.

To all the criticism, Dowlin and his supporters answered that the $140-million library--built with a combination of bond measures and a massive private fund-raising drive--was a victim of its success.

Patronage was up 300% both in the New Main and elsewhere in the system’s 26 branches. Instead of issuing a few dozen library cards daily, as they had in the Old Main, librarians were issuing more than 100 daily. Community groups kept meeting rooms in continual use. Tour buses added the New Main to their routes.

“Some of these folks cannot bear the fact that the library has been so successful,” said Dale Carlson, a former library commissioner who was a key fund-raiser for the New Main. “This library doesn’t look like any other library. It redefines the definition and the concept of what a library is all about.”

The budget went in the red, Dowlin and his supporters said, because he was trying to keep pace with demand by adding more staff and paying huge sums of overtime.

But the union representing librarians countered that the culprits were incompetent management and expensive technology.

Whatever the source of the financial troubles, Dowlin’s admission spurred Mayor Willie Brown and the Board of Supervisors to act. The board took control of the library’s finances from Dowlin, and Brown ordered his budget director to audit the institution’s finances and management practices. The city pumped $1.7 million into the library’s budget from other funds.

In January, Brown forced Dowlin to resign.

At an emotional, standing-room-only Library Commission meeting, an unrepentant Dowlin defended his vision of the library and his record. He hinted that he was forced out by librarians who feared that his high-tech library would reduce them to gatekeepers for the World Wide Web.

Some library commissioners wept as they bade him farewell.

Commission President Steve Coulter, who worked side by side with Dowlin for nine years on the New Main, was so overcome by emotion that, at first, he could not speak as he began to praise him as a visionary “agent of change.”

“This is a revolutionary time in history,” Dowlin told the crowd. “Libraries have to respond to that. . . . I am proud of what I accomplished here. I took a dream . . . I helped shape that dream into a vision and sold that vision to the community. . . . I delivered what we promised.”

The trouble, Dowlin said, was that San Franciscans didn’t want just a library, they wanted “an icon . . . and that is a heavy burden to bear.”

Few believe Dowlin’s departure will end the library’s troubles.

Nor is it likely to quiet the debate over the appropriate mix of technology and tradition in a public library: not in San Francisco, not in professional librarian circles, not in communities across the nation that are trying to decide how much-- and how--to spend money on libraries.

In many communities, librarians have anxiously watched the verbal slugfest between Dowlin and his critics, trying to figure out what went wrong.

The day after Dowlin tendered his resignation, Los Angeles City Librarian Susan Goldberg Kent received a flood of e-mail from colleagues across the country, concerned about what had happened to Dowlin and the New Main.

“People are asking, ‘What is the reason for this resignation? Didn’t Ken build the library people had been asking for?’ People are shocked,” said Goldberg Kent.

“If this is set up as tradition versus innovation, you obviously have a controversy,” she said. “But it is not an either/or proposition. There’s been a lot of passion and people do get nervous, but you have to explain to them that when you put in a computer, it doesn’t mean you will lose a book.”

In San Francisco, the next library battle is likely to erupt over the selection of Dowlin’s replacement.

The Library Commission has promised a nationwide search for someone who will share Dowlin’s vision, but be a skilled manager. Dowlin’s critics are urging the board to look for a librarian less wedded to technology and more reverential of books.

A worried Deetje Boler said she fears the new librarian will be of the same mind as Dowlin.

“So my work is cut out for me,” said the book-loving Gray Panther. “I have got to defend the books.”